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Monday, June 22, 2009
Dialogue with Iran's Monstrous Rulers?
Everything is on the line in Iran, at present -- not only the future of the Iranian regime, but also of the Middle East, and by extension, the most tangible western interests.
Consider: if the Iranian regime were to fall, by far the largest organized threat to peace in the region would be removed. This includes not only a fairly proximate nuclear threat to Israel (for all we know North Korea's second nuclear test was actually Iran's first), but sponsorship of the most efficient part of the world's Islamist terror apparatus.
Hezbollah and Hamas are both, today, for all practical purposes, Iranian proxies. Through them, and through other channels, the regime of the ayatollahs makes money, materiel, and expertise available to terror cells as far away as Argentina, Sweden, the Philippines.
But more significantly, Hezbollah and Hamas together represent an Iranian veto on any Palestinian settlement, or any attempt to ameliorate that conflict, with all that that implies.
The Syrian regime, most dangerous of Israel's neighbours, would, in the absence of Iranian support, have to make accommodations, indeed find new allies.
North Korea's chief conduit into the illicit Middle Eastern arms trade would be lost.
The principal external threat to Iraq would be removed, along with sponsorship of Iraq's own domestic insurgencies. Afghanistan would also be more secure.
In economic terms, the threat of a world crisis provoked by the interdiction of oil shipments from the Persian Gulf would disappear.
Both Russia and China would lose a very important lever of influence on world affairs.
If the ayatollahs come down, the whole world situation is changed, and in every conceivable way for the better. It is impossible to overestimate the stakes of the insurrection in Iran.
As I wrote Wednesday, I expect the regime to win, in a bloodbath. Guns trump warm bodies. But it may well be a close-run thing.
If the regime does win, it will emerge from the carnage as an even deadlier enemy to the West. The only leverage the West will have is appeasement, and that has never worked, anytime or anywhere in history.
President Obama bet, with his Cairo speech, that it will work this time. He disavowed his predecessor's bellicose rhetoric, and committed the U.S. to dialogue with Iran's monstrous rulers.
President Reagan, who extracted more concessions from Soviet tyrants than all previous presidents combined, did not do so by making nice to them...
[Lessons are repeated until learned.]
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Hungary 1956, Iran 2009
What perfect timing. (snip) Now the world watches and waits for another revolution to be crushed. The president of the United States offers little but lip service to freedom's cause, and even that is tardy, hesitant, fearful, as if another people's thirst for liberty were some sort of embarrassment, an obstacle to his plans for a Grand Bargain with a dictatorial regime...
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62% Say Obama Should Not Meet With Iran Until It Stops Nuclear Weapons Program
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This finding is up six points - from 56% - in late January just after President Obama signaled a willingness to talk to his Iranian counterpart without preconditions. A year ago, 59% agreed with the Bush administration position that Iran must stop its nuclear weapons program before direct talks were possible.
Just 23% of voters now say a meeting between the two presidents should go ahead without any preconditions, and 15% are not sure.
Eighty percent (80%) of Republicans and 60% of voters not affiliated with either major party believe Iran must first halt its nuclear weapons production. Democrats are more closely divided, with 49% favoring this precondition but 31% saying it’s not necessary.
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NY Times Can Keep A Secret After All
By now, you may have actually believed the typical NY Times line that they have to disclose everything, secret prisons, NSA tactics, interrogation tactics, because the public has the right to know everything and information has to be free, despite the risks it puts on our military or citizens.
What you probably didn't know is that David Rohde, a NY Times reporter, had been held by kidnappers in Kabul for the last seven months.
Fortunately he was able to escape. Bill Keller wrote in a memo today "the consensus of experts we consulted -- and the judgment of the family -- was that a storm of publicity would at best prolong David's captivity by increasing his apparent value, and could well put him in imminent danger."
Somehow I think that's a lesson that will be forgotten as soon as someone in a uniform faces the same fate.
The Times withheld this information along with at least 40 other news outlets. No, the media never conspires together in the dark...
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French Headscarf Ban Not Discrimination, Says European Court
Europe’s top courts have ruled in favor of a French school that expelled two Muslim girls for refusing to remove their headscarves for physical education classes. The ruling fuels the debate over secularism in France. The European Court of Human Rights has dismissed a complaint by two French Muslim girls that their school violated their freedom of religion and their right to an education.
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WORSE THAN FICTION
The report prepared by Kofi Annan's Global Humanitarian Forum is a case study in bad science and global warming alarmism...
Global warming alarmists are fond of invoking the authority of experts against the skepticism of supposedly amateur detractors. The latest pits former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, now president of the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum, against Roger Pielke, Jr., an expert in disaster trends at the University of Colorado, says the Wall Street Journal.
According to Annan and the Global Humanitarian Forum:
- Climate change-induced disasters, such as droughts and floods, kill 315,000 each year and cost $125 billion, numbers that will rise to 500,000 dead and $340 billion by 2030.
- They assume a four-step chain of causation, beginning with increased emissions, moving to climate-change effects and finally arriving at human effects like malnutrition and "risk of instability and armed conflicts."
- The numbers are a lot less scary when put into context: malaria kills an estimated one million people a year, while AIDS claims an estimated two million; as for the economic costs, $125 billion is slightly less than the gross domestic product (GDP) of New Zealand.
- Moreover, unlike starvation, climate change does not usually kill anyone directly.
"It's generally difficult to obtain valid quantitative findings about the role of socioeconomics and climate change in loss increases, because the random nature of weather extremes, a shortage of quality data, and the role of various other potential factors that act in parallel and interact. Yet, the Annan report engages in a very strange comparison of earthquake and weather disasters; why? They are comparing phenomena with many moving parts over a short time frame, and attributing 100 percent of the resulting difference to human-caused climate change; it doesn't make sense,"
Source: Editorial, "'Worse Than Fiction'," Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2009.
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VALUE-ADDED TAXES MEAN BIG GOVERNMENT
The evidence from Europe shows that consumption taxes go hand-in-hand with rising income taxes...
There is growing interest in Washington in a new national consumption tax, otherwise known as a value-added tax or VAT, says Daniel J. Mitchell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
The classical argument in favor of a VAT says that it's desirable because it has a single rate and is based on consumption. It is true that single-rate systems (assuming a reasonable rate) are less harmful than discriminatory regimes with "progressive" rates. It's also true that a consumption-based tax would not inflict as much damage as our internal revenue code, with its multiple layers of tax on income that is saved and invested. But these arguments only apply if a VAT replaces the current tax system -- which is not the case here. And the evidence from Europe suggests it's not a good idea to add a somewhat-bad tax like the VAT on top of a really bad tax system.
VATs are associated with both higher overall tax burdens and more government spending, says Mitchell:
- In 1965, before the VAT swept across Europe, the average tax burden for advanced European economies (the EU-15) was 27.7 percent of economic output, roughly comparable to the United States, where taxes were 24.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
- European nations began to impose VATs in the late 1960s, and now the European Union requires all members to have a VAT of at least 15 percent.
- By 2006, the OECD reports that the average tax burden for EU-15 nations had climbed to 39.8 percent of GDP.
- The tax burden also has increased in the United States, but at a much slower rate, rising to 28 percent for that year.
- In 1965, according to European Commission figures, government spending in EU-15 nations averaged 30.1 percent of GDP, not much higher than the 28.3 percent of economic output consumed by U.S. government spending.
- According to 2007 data, government spending now consumes 47.1 percent of GDP in the EU-15, significantly higher than the 35.3 percent burden of government in the United States.
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WE WILL NOT HAVE PROSPERITY WHEN POLITICIANS DOMINATE THE ECONOMY
Economic freedom is necessary to building a productive America with the best jobs and greatest prosperity in the world. We will not have new jobs when bureaucrats micromanage companies.
High taxes kill jobs and growth. Low taxes encourage jobs and growth.
Instead of spending $787 billion to reward Democratic interest groups, an effective economic stimulus would get the money to the people that work and the businesses that hire them in the form of lower taxes:
- If we had a two-year, 50 percent reduction in the Social Security and Medicare tax for both the employee and the employer, we would have an extraordinary explosion of small business.
- If we want to compete with China for jobs, we should match the Chinese on capital gains -- their rate is zero.
- If we want to compete for profitable businesses creating good jobs, we should adopt the Irish tax rate of 12.5 percent for corporations.
- If we want to build up capital for investments permanently, we should abolish the death tax.
We need a policy that emphasizes the energy we have in America, especially our vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas. The problem isn't a lack of resources or innovation. The problem is government, which has actually enacted policies which favor foreign imports over American energy...
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Polls find rising concern with Obama on key issues
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– President Barack Obama faces growing concerns among voters over government spending, the auto industry bailout and other economic policies, according to two opinion polls released on Wednesday.
Fifty-eight percent of respondents said Obama and Congress should focus on keeping the budget deficit down, even if takes longer for the economy to recover. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the federal deficit could top $1.8 trillion this fiscal year -- by far a record.
Nearly 70 percent said they had concerns about federal intervention in the economy, including Obama's decision to take an ownership stake in General Motors and the prospect of more government involvement in healthcare...
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Bloomberg's Unchallenging Obama Interview
Maybe reporters Brian Faler or Nicholas Johnston at Bloomberg asked Barack Obama some really challenging questions when they had a chance to interview the President at the White House. Maybe they even did some basic fact-checking. If so, there's precious little evidence of either in their June 16 report.
They allowed the president to blame most of the current year's deficit on George W. Bush. They let him speak of "robust" growth when the best guesstimates they quoted for the second half of this calendar year and all of next year are anemic -- at least as the press benchmarked growth during the Bush 43 years.
The Bloomberg pair also ignored the alarming deterioration in federal receipts from economic activity that has continued into June, one of the four biggest collections months of the year.
Here are key paragraphs from Faler and Johnston's failed filing (bolds are mine):
[Our 'professional' media.]
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THE BIG CHILL
Sometime in the next few weeks Congress will begin consideration of the Waxman-Markey global warming bill to limit CO2 emissions. If passed, the bill will be the largest and widest intervention by government into the lives of Americans since the 1940s.
The Manhattan Institute's Jim Manzi concludes that the benefits of Waxman-Markey would not be much:
- Historical data show that the average rate of warming in the 30 years from 1977 to 2007 was just .32 degree Fahrenheit per decade.
- IF effective, the new bill is estimated to lower global temperatures by about .18 degree Fahrenheit ... by 2100.
- Manzi estimates the additional economic costs of the bill would be .8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), while the economic benefits would be just .08 percent -- so the costs would be 10 times the benefits. [taking proponents' unsubstantiated claims of 'benefits' at face value]
- According to a 1999 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimate, the emissions cuts the Kyoto Protocol would have required in 2010 were likely to reduce America's GDP by $275 billion to $468 billion, or $921 to $1,565 per person, and of course Kyoto does not apply to fast-growing developing countries such as China and India.
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House of Representatives switchboard:
202.225.3121 - 202.224-3121
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202.225.3121 - 202.224-3121
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ABC Global Warming Special Makes Up Future, But It’s Not ‘Sci-Fi’
The world is about to end, or at least that’s according to ABC’s “Good Morning America.” The June 2 segment promoted a new special called “Earth 2100.” The program follows Lucy, a girl born in 2009, and her dramatic story about how if we don’t take drastic measures immediately climate change will cause droughts, floods, mass migration, and starvation.
This may sound straight from a science-fiction movie, but “Good Morning America” went to great lengths to assure viewers this wasn’t science fiction and that by airing this series they were changing journalism. Bob Woodruff, host of the special, called making up what will happen in the future “a different kind of journalism.” The segment quoted him saying, “not a prediction of what will happen, but what might happen.”
After the preview, “Good Morning America’s” Diane Sawyer responded and tried to pretend the whole program had some news value.“Amazing someone born into 2009. We’re not talking about sci-fi here and to come up with a human voice for it, a family voice, for it.”
ABC left out the necessary crystal ball from the segment, so the audience was left to guess how they could predict 2100 so accurately.
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MEXICAN MEDICAL TOURISM FOR CALIFORNIANS?
The primary reason Californians head to Mexico for health treatment is to escape the state's expensive regulatory burden on health facilities,..
According to new research by Steven P. Wallace of the University of California, Los Angeles, almost a million Californian residents crossed the border into Mexico for treatment in 2004. The primary reason was to escape California's expensive regulatory burden on health facilities:
- California hospitals shift the costs of treating Medicare and Medicaid patients (for whom government reimbursement does not cover costs) to private insurers.
- Professor Daniel Kessler of Stanford University figures that premiums for private health insurance would be about 11 percent lower without this cost shift -- a hidden tax that private insurers can avoid by leaving the state.
- For example, seismic retrofitting and nurse-patient ratios, which Mexican hospitals do not.
- California hospitals also have to deal with a militant union, the California Nurses Association, whose members parade in front of the Capitol by the hundreds in support of more government interference in health care, in the quest for "universal" coverage.
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WHERE DOES SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH CARE WORK?
The criticism of single-payer health care -- primarily as practiced in Canada and Europe -- has been that operations and procedures are long-delayed or denied and health care is rationed to control costs. For example:
- In Canada, the average wait for a 65-year-old man to get a hip replacement is six months, according to the Freedom Works Foundation.
- The average wait time in a Canadian emergency room is 16 hours and 18 minutes.
- Also, the average cancer test and radiation treatment cycles vary between 6 to 8 weeks, according to the foundation.
- In Great Britain, at any one time, there are about a million people waiting to get into hospitals.
- Almost 900,000 Canadian patients are on the waiting list at any point in time, according to the Fraser Institute.
- In New Zealand, 90,000 people are on the waiting lists, according to government figures.
"Many of the people waiting are waiting in pain. Many are risking their lives by waiting. And there is no market mechanism in these countries to get care to people who need it first."
Obama and most Democrats in Congress are pushing for a "public option," or government-run health insurance program that would compete with private health care companies. Many analysts agree that the private, market-driven companies will be unable to compete with a government-run insurance program, which would have nearly unlimited resources...
[Obama has said he expects these fist steps to eventually result in only a government run single-payer system "fifteen, maybe twenty years out". We're being sold a bill of goods.]
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WHY THE HEALTH CARE RUSH?
President Obama seems to view his health care program as sink-or-swim, so Democrats are rushing the largest entitlement expansion since LBJ into law with a truncated debate and as little public scrutiny as possible. The Senate plans to begin marking up legislation in early June, voting by the August recess and sending the bill to the Oval Office by Thanksgiving.
However, it's not hard to see why Democrats are trying to hew to this full-speed-ahead timetable, says the Wall Street Journal:
- Their health overhaul will run up a 13-figure price tag at a time when spending and deficits are already at epic levels and hook the middle class to an intravenous drip of government health subsidies for generations to come.
- Yet, slowing the growth rate of U.S. health costs by 1.5 percentage points would increase real gross domestic product (GDP) by more than 2 percent in 2020 and nearly 8 percent in 2030.
The reality is that Democrats are contemplating the most sweeping restructuring of the health markets since 1965, and they don't want to let the details slow them down. Better to grab what they will portray as a major domestic achievement while Obama is at the height of his popularity and before anyone understands what it will mean in practice. The consequences and the cost can be 'explained' later...
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Childless on Father's Day
Some kids will be surprising their fathers with breakfast in bed this weekend, while others will present a gift inscribed with the phrase, "world's best dad." Some men, though, will only be reminded of the heartache from losing the opportunity to become fathers.
They are the third victims of abortion...
[In which they have no say whatsoever.]
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Delayed Dreamliner nears take-off
The US aerospace giant Boeing is getting its 787 Dreamliner ready for its first test flight within days, banking on the new fuel-efficient plane to sail above stiff market headwinds.
Boeing expects the much-delayed Dreamliner to have its maiden flight within the next eight days on a schedule that puts delivery of the plane to first customer, All Nippon Airways, in the first quarter of next year.
[And, as a private company unlike Europe's Airbus, has literally bet the solvency of the company on the project.]
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‘Far Left’ Label on CBS First in More than Two Years
As my colleague Mark Finkelstein noted this morning, now that gay activists are unhappy with Obama, CBS has dusted off the “far left” label and used it to describe those who are upset that the President has not done more to advance the gay agenda. Co-host Harry Smith on Thursday: “President Obama gets some pressure from an unlikely source, the far left....”
So when was the last time CBS even used the phrase “far left” to describe fringe groups beyond the liberal mainstream? A Nexis search reveals that the last time the phrase crossed the lips of a CBS reporter was more than two years ago. On the May 17, 2007 CBS Evening News, reporter Sharyl Attkisson was talking about an immigration reform bill:
“It’s a complete reform of US immigration law as we know it, worked out by a bipartisan group of negotiators, including Senator Ted Kennedy, politically on the far left, and Saxby Chambliss on the far right.”
[What bias? {Hint: ask yourself the last time you heard 'right-wing' used by the MSM. (Hint2: consult a clock not a calendar)}]
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